In an increasingly mobile society, people use many different devices on a daily basis in order to stay connected: PC/laptop, cell phone, office phone, home phone, PDA, tablet, internet connection, etc. It is the emergence of multimedia communications, enabled by for example SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), that now allows for multiple devices or applications, as well as many different forms of communication (i.e. voice, video, chat, data, etc.) to be associated with one person or object.
In a multimedia environment, the ability to route and re-direct communications sessions effectively and efficiently is an important challenge, especially from the perspective of business productivity. Within an enterprise, much effort is expended and effectively wasted in trying to track down people for urgent meetings or calls. This effort and the associated wasted time takes on an even greater importance in certain settings, such as a hospital. The efficiency with which communications occur in a healthcare environment often directly affects the quality of the healthcare services provided to patients and, in some cases, has a critical impact on the condition of patients. For instance, in situations where a few minutes can represent the difference between life and death for a patient, the efficiency of communications may be a determining factor in saving the patient's life.
When it comes to routing and re-directing sessions within existing communications systems, different systems rely on different routing factors and allow for different degrees of routing and handling of the sessions. In the case of telephony networks, phone calls are commonly handled and re-routed on the basis of the location of a communications terminal and the state of the terminal. For example, the approximate location of a cellular phone can be used to route an emergency call to the correct emergency agency. Within these networks, the routing for both the lower (network-oriented) layer communications and the higher (application-oriented) layer communications is usually changed dynamically and transparently to the source and destination.
In other existing communications systems, routing/re-directing of sessions may be conducted on the basis of policy input or user configuration. For example, one such communications system allows users to indicate their current mode of communications, such as “office phone” or “cell phone”, and adjusts routing parameters accordingly. In another system, the user is allowed to input a current state, such as “in the office” or “mobile”, and the system will make the assumption that the user's preferred mode of communications is the office phone when in the office and the cell phone when mobile. Typically, adjusting the routing parameters involves updating one or more entries in a routing table, in order to specify the preferred route and source/destination device. In a typical example of implementation of this communication system, a static pre-configured set of routes is coupled with a manual or semi-manual triggering mechanism to change the routes (such as pushing a touch tone keypad on a telephone).
“Presence” is also used to reconfigure routing parameters and tables in other existing communications systems. Presence, a concept that has emerged as the sophistication of computer and multimedia communications has increased, is a status of the nature of activity of the user (object or person), usually in the context of computer or communications activity. A well-known example of presence is the indication provided by an on-line chat network to advise other users of a person's status, which may be “online”, “online and active”, “online and busy”, “offline”, “web camera active”, “web camera inactive”, etc. Other users view the presence indication and decide on the basis of this indication whether or not to try contacting the person, whether to change the nature of their message, whether to change the configuration of their multimedia communications session, etc. Users also have control over what other users can see in terms of their status and may customize this status to a certain degree. Administrators of the on-line chat network can select the set of automated presence indicators to be displayed and have control over network functions related to presence.
Unfortunately, the above-described known methods for routing and re-directing communications sessions lack the necessary intelligence and sophistication to meet the current and future demand for optimized communications and improved business processes within multimedia communications systems. Admittedly, each of these methods in and of themselves may be useful and applicable to a certain degree for routing and re-directing communications sessions within a multimedia environment. However, the complexity associated with handling communications sessions in or with a multimedia communications system, as well as the potential for intelligently automating routing and re-directs within the multimedia communications system based on multiple sources of information, is an untapped area of innovation.
There is a thus a need in the industry for improved systems and methods for dynamically re-directing communications sessions in a multimedia environment.